En cette journée de lutte pour les droit de la femme, je vous partage ma citation préférée de la suffragette Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939), première femme psychiatre et militante socialiste libertaire.
« Il est certain que casser un carreau n’est pas un argument ; mais si l’opinion, sourde aux arguments, n’est sensible qu’aux carreaux cassés, que faire ? Les casser, évidemment. »
Any "leftist" who tells you not to #vote isn't your fucking friend, and if they call you "privileged" or a "bootlicker" whatever bullshit, tell them to fuck off and gamble with the lives of minorities somewhere else.
I don't give a shit about your theoretical #revolution if you can't even be bothered to do basic fucking #harmreduction
One side things I'm a disgusting abomination, and if you tell me voting against them makes me a privileged bootlicker, you need to pull you head out of your ass and maybe think for one fucking second about the rights of others. #voting#elections#privilege#democracy
Today in Labor History November 23, 1903: Army troops were sent to Cripple Creek, Colorado to put down a rebellion by striking coal miners. 600 union members were thrown into a military bullpen, and held for weeks without charges. When a lawyer arrived with a writ of habeas corpus, General Bell, who led the repression, responded "Habeas corpus, hell! We'll give 'em post mortems!” The strike was led by Big Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners, which, at the time, was the most militant union in the country, calling for revolution and abolition of the wage system.
Today in Labor History November 7, 1915: Emiliano Zapata proposed a new labor law that included an 8-hour day, prohibition of work for children under age 14, worker cooperatives to run factories abandoned by owners, and a fixed minimum wage.
Today In Labor History September 29, 1921: Lithuanian anarchist revolutionary Fanya Baron was executed by the Cheka on the personal order of Lenin. Baron spent her early life participating in the Chicago workers' movement and IWW. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, she moved to Ukraine and joined the Makhnovist movement. She was arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka. On July 1, 1921, she broke out of prison with the help of the Underground Anarchists and went to Moscow, where she was discovered and aided by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. However, on August 17, 1921, she was discovered and arrested again by the Cheka, and ultimately executed.
Anarcha-feminists went on the offensive in the fight for reproductive freedom in the 1990s.
Women in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989–98), the leading US anarchist organization of the period, advanced sharp critiques of the liberal abortion strategy that had ceded so much ground to the Right.
Anarchists offered radical alternatives for women to take back control of their lives and bodies. Rather than petition the state for reforms, they mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level.
They maintained that abortion restrictions were a form of state violence, especially as they corresponded with the structural violence of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Anarchists argued that feminists must oppose the state itself as the ultimate patriarchal institution and the source of much of the violence they faced.
Thus, rather than the slogan “We’re prochoice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner reading “We’re prochoice and we riot!”
Today in Labor History November 26, 1911: Paul Lafargue, Cuban-French revolutionary and son-in-law of Karl Marx, died. Lafargue wrote “The Right to Be Lazy” in 1893 while in prison. Lafargue had Jewish, French, Indian, Creole and African ancestry. When IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon asked him about his origins, he replied that he was proudest of his “negro” ancestry. In his youth, Lefargue participated in the International Students Congress in 1865. Consequently, the government banned him from all French universities. So, he moved to London, where he became a frequent visitor to Marx’s house, ultimately marrying his daughter, Laura. Lafargue was a member of the General Council of the First International. He also participated in the Paris Commune.
Today in Labor History August 4, 1792: Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born. He promoted freedom of speech, ending aristocratic and clerical privilege, and equal distribution of income and wealth. He was also a vegetarian, advocate for free love and an atheist, who wrote about the link between organized religion and social repression. His poems and political writings were admired by Marx, Gandhi and others. His poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819) was the first modern work to support nonviolent protest. It was recited by students at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and by protesters in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy following the Peterloo Massacre (8/16/1819), when the British cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand political representation, killing 13. He was married to, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.
The Mask of Anarchy:
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!
Did you know that the first female supercentenarian (someone reaching the age of 110) was also the first person whose life spanned three centuries?
Margaret Ann Neve was born in Guernsey in 1792. Her father was a wealthy privateer who died aged 49.
She remembered the #French#Revolution & visited #Waterloo just after the battle. She was married but childless. She did not eat or drink between meals, climbed an apple tree aged 110 & got her first ever illness at age 105.
How long can this go on for? How long before we realise we’re being screwed over while they boil the planet? How long before a #revolution drags these bastards into The Hague?
Today in Labor History August 14, 1791: Dutty Boukman led a Vodou ceremony with enslaved people from Saint Domingue plantations that led to the start of the Haitian Revolution, the largest slave uprising since the Spartacist revolt against the Romam empire. Boukman was born in Senegambia. His name, Boukman, came from the English “Book Man,” because he not only knew how to read, but taught other enslaved people how to read. He, and priestess Cécile Fatiman, had led a series of meetings with enslaved people prior to August 14 to organized and plan for the uprising. Boukman was killed by French troops a few months into the revolution. Trinidadian Marxist writer C. L. R. James wrote the best book on the Haitian Revolution: “The Black Jacobins,” (1938). Also, be sure to check out the wonderful music of the contemporary Haitian pop group, Boukman Eksperyans, named for the Haitian revolutionary, Dutty Boukman. A fictionalized version of Boukman plays the title character in Guy Endore's novel “Babouk,” an anti-capitalist parable about the Haitian Revolution.
Paris is burning again. And so it Marseille, Lyon and... loads of other places. This is the result of police murdering 17 year old Nahel M in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, and then, as usual, lying about what happened. The murder is just the latest in a long row of recent as well as historical events within France's racist and colonial tradition of exploitation, marginalization and violence directed towards people who have their roots in France's old colonial sphere. Few events exemplify this horrific tradition as strongly as the Paris massacre of 1961, when up to 300 Algerian protestors were killed by the cops.
But this issue also goes deeper. When the workers are constantly exploited for the benefit of a small political end economic elite, when we're manipulated by arrogant and corrupt politicians, when we see no hope, future or place in the society they force us to endure, when we live through climate disasters caused by the rapacious capitalist exploitation of our planet and are repeatedly faced with violence from the state when we raise our voices and take action - why would we have any loyalty at all with the system that is killing us and undermining our very conditions of existance?
The rebels in France are leading the way by burning down the system that daily tramples them, exploits them and murders them. Police stations and luxury cars are on fire, and so are banks. Barricades are erected, cops are being attacked, and the stores, where commodities that we cannot afford are mocking us from the selves, are now breached using stolen luxury cars. Great! Full solidarity with those that have had enough and are showing it in the streets!
However, in order for the riots to go beyond being just a spark that is eventually put out by the violence of the state, it has to not only spread geographically, but also socially. They have to link up with resistance against neoliberal austerity, against the pension reforms, and with the slumbering working class organization in the workplaces where our salaries are increasingly eroded while the rich are laughing at us and drowning in profits. The riots need to engulf schools and universities, in our neighborhoods where people are evicted and forced to live in squalid environments while the landlords make profits and gentrify.
Only then can the riot turn from a flickering promise to a burning revolutionary situation that really threatens the power and position of the capitalist elites and state bureaucrats. Let's do what we can to stimulate and encourage this development, while at the same time remembering that the same system is keeping us in chains wherever we are at, be it in Sweden or someplace else, and that we also need to organize resistance and build alternatives where we are, in the ways available to us. 🔥 🏴 🖤
I know publishing articles in It's Going Down is counterproductive to any academic career I want, but I am proud to publish with them. Unlike most academic publishing, their articles come out of (and promote) movement work and are meant to be directly useful in radical struggles.
I think that @igd_news has prompted me to produce some of my best writing:
“We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom
Podcast interview: Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s: A Discussion
"On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talk with both long-time anarchist organizer Suzy Subways and historian Spencer Beswick about how anarchists in the 1990s organized in the face of a deadly far-Right attack on abortion access across the so-called United States." https://itsgoingdown.org/clinic-defense-1990s-abortion/
Anyway, just thinking about how important movement-based institutions/infrastructure like It's Going Down are. I really appreciate the work they do. And I guess that's why they've been banned by the free-speech lovers at Twitter/Facebook/Instagram.
AEW REVOLUTION Discussion Thread 03/03/24
Tonight, AEW presents Revolution! LIVE from the Greeensboro Coliseum Complex in Greensboro, NC! The card includes:...